re: Lawyer: Racism key in Mississippi hot car death

First, its stunning how often this happen, but when it does happen and it is 100%, without question, a mistake I don't think sending the parent to jail helps anyone. With that said, some type of rehabilitation should be offered and it should be across the board sentence.

If anything, it would be a lot cheaper to require someone to go to 6 months of rehabilitation of some type than to have them sit in jail for 3-5 years.

In this situation, this guy does have a point. He does the same exact thing as someone else, why is he punished different?

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Taking his own experience into account and the fact the district attorney and the police chief are white and Blunt is black, Moore said he believes Blunt should have never been arrested.

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To be clear, there have been charges filed against white people who forgot their children in the car before. Every district, every DA does something different here....so the racism defense doesn't fly IMO.

That said, most of these horrific accidents and there's not much the law can do to these parents that they won't do to themselves for years down the road. It's not likely that this guy would have been convicted. It's a catastrophic mistake that he'll regret the rest of his life. It happens to a wide range of people, and it can happen to anyone.

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A white woman a few weeks prior wasn't charged with anything.

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White people have been charged for this exact thing before. Every district, and every DA responds differently.

What's most alarming here is how often this kind of shite happens. It's basically any parent's worst nightmare.

LINK

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The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn’t want any sedation, that he didn’t deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.

The charge in the courtroom was manslaughter, brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer -- beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cellphone -- he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at day care. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon in the blistering heat of July.

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Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?

The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.

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There may be no act of human failing that more fundamentally challenges our society’s views about crime, punishment, justice and mercy. According to statistics compiled by a national childs’ safety advocacy group, in about 40 percent of cases authorities examine the evidence, determine that the child’s death was a terrible accident -- a mistake of memory that delivers a lifelong sentence of guilt far greater than any a judge or jury could mete out -- and file no charges. In the other 60 percent of the cases, parsing essentially identical facts and applying them to essentially identical laws, authorities decide that the negligence was so great and the injury so grievous that it must be called a felony, and it must be aggressively pursued.

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In roughly 60 percent of these cases, charges are filed.

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gorillacoco

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That's what I get for not paying attention when hitting enter.

My third child is 6 months old. When shite gets crazy with kids, etc., i can see how its possible that someone forgets the baby is in the back. Especially if the baby is sleeping and you are mentally distracted.

If you have something on your mind for work or something, and your wife calls you as you are about to leave to go to the babysitter, but end up driving to work because you are distracted. For me, its robotic as you get out and go in to where you work.

I haven't left my kid in the car or anything, not even close really, but damn, this kind of story terrifies and depresses me more than makes me want to hurt the parents. I would have a hard time living with myself if something like this happened to my child because of me.

Stupid people shouldn't have children. If there was an IQ requirement to become a parent, we would have a better world.

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Stupid people shouldn't have children.

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Look at the WaPo article I posted. This has happened to physicians, rocket scientists, engineers, business executives......it can happen to the brightest or the barely literate - and it does.

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ETA: Wait, just read that the white woman wouldn't be charged. They may have a point here.

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Yeah - struggling to see a difference here to justify disparate treatment. Maybe there's something we don't know about in Blunt's case, a history of neglect, but still - and as you know, I rarely play the race card. It at least deserves a little looking into.